Pun Salad

Gearing up for Amaerica's 250th birthday, I guess, I've been reading a decent number of books about the Founders, the Constitution, the Revolution, etc. I'm also kind of a fan of Jonathan Turley, whose conservative/libertarian take on current events at his website closely matches my own. And I read and enjoyed his previous book, The Indispensible Right last year. So…

This one is a veritable pinball machine of topics. I find it difficult to summarize, but a major theme is "democratic despotism", the tendency of factions who knit together enough people-power to rule over, oppress, and even kill their opponents. Turley takes a close look at Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense pamphlet was one of the major drivers of the American Revolution. Great! But Paine's overall political philosophy rightfully worried founders like Madison, who (correctly) speculated about how it would quickly lead to violent mobocracy. It's pretty clear that America dodged a bullet despotism-wise, although it was a close shave. (One of Turley's anecdotes involves Declaration-signer/Constitution-writer James Wilson, whose patriotic bona fides were beyond question, but nevertheless nearly became a victim of a Philadelphia drunken mob in 1779.)

And Paine eventually absconded to France, where (despite not knowing French) he became a moving force behind their revolution. And, well, we all know what happened. In the words of Jacques Mallet du Pan: "Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children." (That quote is the book's epigraph.) Turley does a fine job of describing why the result was known as the Terror. (And might make the reader look askance at Jacobin magazine, influential on America's left wing.) Paine escaped with his life, but it was a (another) close shave. Returning to America, he never regained the respectability or influence he had in 1776, and died largely unmourned.

But there's a lot of other stuff going on in the book, too: a look back at the origins of democracy in ancient Greece (it didn't work well). And a look at the current state of affairs in America, where the enthusiasm for "democracy" seems to to invariably nudge people toward oppression of opponents and violence.

Turley views our AI/robotic future with some trepidation, worrying that we're headed quickly toward an era of mass unemployment. Could be! But America has had massive economic sector-shifts in the past, accompanied by similar predictions of doom, but that's been handled pretty well, albeit not painlessly. But (of course) this time could be different; see what you think.